Category: Games and Rhetoric

Since I began studying my online Mafia community, I’ve been doing a lot of wider reading in technical communication, looking at foundational texts to fill in around things I’d studied before. It’s meant digging into the backlog of articles and books I’d...

When I first wrote about the online social deception game community I joined, I mentioned my failed attempts to get my hands on game development documents for pedagogical purposes. When I began to play mafia with this group, and to...

Over the last couple of years, I’ve tried like hell to get my hands on game scripts and bibles. After assessing the lack of good informational texts and examples for students interested in writing games, or writing for game studios, I...

This past Saturday night, after a long summer hiatus, I sat down at my desk with my dice and my computer and ran a session of my digital Dungeons and Dragons campaign, Shards of Aeridas. The game lasted five hours,...

In the 50th year of the journal of College Composition and Communication, in 1999, Jacqueline Jones Royster and Jean C. Williams began their essay “History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies” with a statement...

A few months ago, I wrote about A Normal Lost Phone and the layered experience of inhabiting another through the use of their phone as an empathy device, so when I stumbled upon another game that used a similar approach,...

In the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time considering so-called “walking simulators,” first as I dug into different definitions of games, and then, as I moved away from that, into perceptions of games and the experiences they...

I’d like to pick up a small part of last week’s discussion on games, narratives, and experience, as the idea of environmental narrative bled into my seminar papers this semester as well. If we want to think about games as...

There has been a lot of discussion over the past week about Ian Bogost’s recent article in The Atlantic entitled, “Video Games are Better Without Stories,” an article in which Bogost argues, ultimately, exactly what his title says–that is, that...

Trigger Warning: Mentions of Rape, Sexual Assault During my last year of college, I took a film course while getting my English minor. The course itself was pretty fun: an in depth analysis of “bad” film and what made it...